The head of the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has warned that there is “no clear route” away from key financial benchmarks like the London Interbank Offered Rate, a year after the rate-rigging scandal first came to light.

The comments from Martin Wheatley, chief executive of the FCA, come just days after the Financial Stability Board, a regulatory taskforce established by the G20, announced that he will chair a new Official Sector Steering Group of regulators and central banks that will review the use of benchmarks globally.

They also come ahead of a new European proposal for the regulation of benchmarks that is expected to be unveiled by the European Commission in the middle of next month.

During the keynote speech at the International Derivatives Expo in London on Wednesday, Wheatley said a shift away from well-entrenched benchmarks like Libor and Euribor, which underpin hundreds of trillions of financial contracts worldwide, would raise “complex financial questions for banks and regulators”.

“What happens if a benchmark designed for one purpose no longer fits that purpose, or if the underlying liquidity of a benchmark suddenly dries up? What if you have years or decades of products that are linked to a benchmark that don’t have the ability to switch to something new? We don’t have a clear route, but are working towards a set of principles and have a contingency plan that should allow us to move forward,” he said.

Wheatley also said it would be down to the international financial community – not just London – to decide on the long-term future of critical benchmarks.

An early draft of the European Commission’s regulatory proposal on financial benchmarks recommends handing oversight of benchmarks deemed “critical’ to the European Securities and Markets Authority. Such a proposal is likely to face fierce resistance from the UK, after the FCA assumed oversight of Libor at the beginning of April.

Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and also co-chair of a separate taskforce established by the International Organization of Securities Commission with Wheatley, has previously called for Libor to be scrapped.

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Speaking at a conference in London in April, Gensler said: “I believe that Libor, Euribor and other similar interest rate benchmarks are unsustainable in the long run. These benchmarks – referencing markets with insufficient transactions, particularly in longer tenors – undermine market integrity and threaten financial stability.”

He added that the market already has experience in switching from benchmarks that have become obsolete, pointing to the raft of interest rate benchmarks that were discontinued after the euro was created.

Benchmarks like Libor and Euribor are calculated through a daily survey that asks banks how much it would cost to borrow cash from each other. Barclays, UBS and RBS, three of the banks involved in setting Libor, have been fined a total of around $2.5bn over the last year after regulatory investigations found evidence of benchmark manipulation.